Abstract

The purpose of the study is to explore the impact of chess instruction for visually impaired children on math achievement. The study group consists of a total of 26 visually impaired students from inclusion classes in inclusive secondary schools of MoNE (Ministry of National Education), 9 male and 5 female students in the experiment group and 8 male and 4 female students in the control group. The experiment group consisted of those who were trained for chess over a 12 week- period (one day a week, 4 h) as of the semester break and the control group consisted of those who were never trained for chess. Math scores of the both groups during the fall and the spring semesters which were the recorded scores in the “e-school” system of the Provincial Directorate for National Education were verbally learned from those who were included in the study.  Arithmetic mean and standard deviation were employed in the statistical analysis of the data, and the Wilcoxen Test was used for the assessment of the participants’ progress. For the fall semester, arithmetic mean and standard deviation of the experiment group were 66.52±4.45, and those of the control group were 66.96±3.55. For the spring semester, arithmetic mean and standard deviation of the experiment group were 73.47±3.59, and those of the control group were 66.88± 3.23. In the comparison of the fall and the spring semesters of the experiment group, there was a significant difference at the level of 0,001 (p<0,05) while there was no significant difference at the level of 0,441 in the control group (p>0,05). In the comparative study of the experiment group and the control group in both semesters, there was no significant difference at the level of 0,905 for the fall semester (p>0,05) while there was a significant difference at the level of 0,002 for the spring semester (p<0,05). As a result, chess instruction for the visually impaired has proven to be influential on math achievement.

Key words: Visual impairment, chess, mathematics.